I'm fairly new to Puppy (only used it a bit for some fiddling with linux, nice distro btw) and now want to get it working on an old PC I have lying around. I have it installed on a USB flash drive, which works on my laptop but the old PC can't boot from USB. It boots correctly from the CD-ROM, but this is no good because I can't save changes to the disk, and I don't want to install onto the hard disk because then it wouldn't be portable.

So I installed WakePup2 from PETget and created a boot disk. The disk starts successfully and finds my USB drive okay, but then it can't find the USBFLASH marker file and keeps asking for a directory to find the files. I have checked and the file is there along with all the other linux files. Linux is installed on the only partition on the drive which is formatted as FAT32 with the boot flag set. (I previously had two partitions on the disk, one FAT32 with my files on it and the other EXT2 with linux on, but had the same problem and read that WakePup2 didn't support EXT2 so changed it to the current setup).

I set the boot sequence to try anything before the hard drive. The Advent has no optical drive, I only tried it in the Asus to see if the problem was isolated to the netbook, but no

(I am a doddery old lady and know nothing about Linux except that a few years ago i tried to install it on a 10-year-old Compaq laptop but could never get the wifi working. I'm even more doddery now than I was then )

G'day all,
With the Advent 4211 Netbook I would put a Micro CF Card (cost - $10) into the card-reader slot, install Puppy to the Micro CF Card and boot off that. Check the manual to make sure the card-reader slot is bootable, but they usually are. Might be possible to do the same trick with the Asus, but i'm not familiar with that particular beastie.

Both FAT16 and FAT32 partitions must have the LBA Flag and the Boot Flag set. Otherwise weird and not-so-wonderful things will begin to happen. Kind of like Puppy in the Twilight Zone . . .

Attached below is the contents of a USB Flash Drive which works in conjunction with a WakePup2 Floppy to boot my old Toshiba laptop into Puppy 421, which is downloadable here. If that doesn't work with your machine, try Puppy 421 Retro. md5sums should be run to make sure you have good downloads:

NOTE: The USB Stick must be plugged DIRECTLY into a USB Port for it to work with WakePup2. If you plug into a USB Hub it won't work because WakePup2 can only look at the Top Layer (the Root folder at the top of the USB Drive). A USB Hub constitutes another level down and WakePup2 can't scan there, so won't be able to see the files vmlinuz, puppy_***.sfs and initrd.gz, which it needs to Boot.

Contents of USB Stick.jpg

Description

This USB Flash Drive works with a WakePup2 Floppy to boot my ancient and magnificent old Toshiba laptop

Filesize

74.31 KB

Viewed

522 Time(s)

Last edited by looseSCREWorTWO on Wed 05 May 2010, 03:15; edited 1 time in total

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